


There's Hope in the Air

by sharklion



Category: Yu-Gi-Oh! ARC-V
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-19
Updated: 2015-05-19
Packaged: 2018-03-31 05:56:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,306
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3966955
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sharklion/pseuds/sharklion
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Her greatest strength is her strength to protect, and there's not much left of the world but she'd do anything to save what's there a thousand times over.  If she can be a bulwark against his erosion, she <i>will</i> be.<br/>--<br/>Written roughly for the prompt: I wish you would write a fic where you explored the creation and destruction god theory that's been brought up occasionally in the Arc-V fandom.</p>
            </blockquote>





	There's Hope in the Air

Yuzu didn't think she'd ever get used to wreckage, but she knows she did. The burned out hull of Heartland, the scorched smell of crashed D-Wheels and decayed Synchro city slums, all of that became natural. So natural that looking at the blank expanse where ruins should be is foreign and _wrong_. She hasn't seen anything like this since Standard. It's an echo of her memories of being early for her dad's classes and the barren blackness of the real solid vision system, waiting for a switch to be thrown and its imitation universe to be turned back on.

Only this time, it's the real thing.

"Hiiragi Yuzu." The Professor— Akaba Leo— says her name like he has a _right_ to it, like her name and power is his to command. She jolts the opposite direction to face him. Behind him the landscape is eaten away, rotted through with void and in the emptiness his voice carries. But still, it's not yet all gone. "There is no other option left to you. You hold the power of creation, and this world requires you to remake it." 

There's not a lot left. He's not _wrong_ in what he's saying but his words are weighty and twisted in her gut. Serena would have done what he said, in a heartbeat. She understood the simple logic of justice and reparations, the ends justifying the means. Serena had been raised to wield power, for it to sing sweet and pure in her blood.

But power just sits in Yuzu's hands now, still more girl than Goddess. 

(Probably, somewhere, something went wrong. Probably, Rin and Ruri and Serena and her were supposed to build up to create someone new, like each piece of Ute and Hyugo and Joeri had hollowed out and destroyed all she knew of Yuya. Each piece gouged out more, and more. Taking in Joeri, the last and least human, had killed off what remained. He left a God of Destruction left in Yuya's place, and that God had done nothing more than nature and name called for it to do until Yuzu had taken her cards and beaten it back. 

Then it finished its work and destroyed itself too.)

If she had the power to throw it in his face, she would have done that, anger plain on her face and in the peaked fury of her voice. "What's with you?! At least some of this is your fault too. . . if you Akaba family hadn't come, Yuya wouldn't have. . . " she shudders. "Neither of us would have awakened! What was wrong with the way the world was before?! Why couldn't you have left us alone?!" 

"Our worlds were always heading towards this fate. They were not meant to be separate. They _could not_ have continued to exist as they were. Think of the Synchro world you saw, of the Fusion world I took leadership of— their systems were in place long before I came! Without you, destruction was this world's only path!"

Akaba Leo had vanished only three years ago, and Serena and Sora had been raised the way they were for far longer than that. There's no doubt that part of it is true but she doesn't care anyway. She's seen the way even her own Standard was heading and if XYZ _wasn't_ buried before it could start to decay, Leo would know. 

"So!? Even if we were, isn't that our own choice to make?! It's our world to live in, and to do our best to try and fix. It's not yours to create and destroy!"

"No," This he says seriously, weighty. A man setting up his punchline, "That honor would be _yours_."

It's the kind of joke that in simpler times would have earned Yuya a whack from her fan. But the stakes are too high for that— she takes a deep breath, swallowing her tears. "No. If you wanted a Mother Goddess, you should have used Rin!"

Yuzu is not good as doing as she is told, and he doesn't have any skill that could defeat her will. So he cheats— he calls on the power of the destruction thick in the air around them, like _the world's biggest hypocrite_. His hand is over his extra deck and the pendulum summon that Yuya's God granted the world rips a hole in the sky— and rips into Leo.

It's not even blackness, he's just _gone_ , a crack opening in his face. All at once she understand the plastic-metal graft on his skull. He's lost to this power before, and covered it up, but there's no hiding this and each sacrifice and grants him power. The strength that it gives him is comparative to her own but hungry, even still. There's nothing she can do to help him. If he wins, it will swallow him whole— it will take in what's left of the world around them, but that's his mistake:

Her greatest strength is her strength to protect, and there's not much left of the world but she'd do anything to save what's there a thousand times over. If she can be a bulwark against his erosion, she _will_ be. 

So her first, ignominious act as the Goddess of Creation is cheating back. He could barely stand up against the strength of Hiiragi Yuzu, regular girl, let alone Hiiragi Yuzu, girl with the power to create cards. 

But he's invested too much to realize loss now. Desperation calls more of destruction's power to him and into his body. The void cracks him open and when she wins there's nothing left of him that the ridiculous memory of just his mouth left hanging in midair and the echo in her head of his scream, like the world's most traumatizing Cheshire Cat. She's momentarily too stunned to be horrified. 

But the moment passes and she falls to her knees, a wave of terror at her own power— at what Leo did to himself. The first droplets of a flood gather at the corners of her eyes, salt water from her sorrow to trail her cheeks and splatter to the broken earth. Yuzu thinks, then, that Yuya would have laughed. 

Now he's gone, and there's no boys around to hold her or hand her a handkerchief to dry her eyes. 

(If she wants to, she can do as Leo said— it's not too late to put the world back. She could put Yuya back beside her, paint his smile back on like he never lost it. She could sweep every other world under the rug, and leave only Standard, like the most perfect of all worlds in everyone's untarnished memories. She could put it all at balance. She could create a world with no place for Ruri, Rin, and Serena to call home.

No, she couldn't do that.)

They are not coming, now or ever. Still sniffling, Yuzu stands, and turns to face the city— the mad chimera result of Leo's plans. The wild amalgamation of all the worlds, stacked atop each other in haphazard fusion, veined with the darkness of loss. She steps forward, and seals over the gap of destruction in the asphalt at her feet and looks up— The You Show school sign winks down at her.

Pressed to a window, she can see Tatsuya's and Futoshi's faces, and Yaiba's above them, and then— a recording camera. She waves up at Melissa Claire for all the new world to see, as someone inside figured out the new bizarre layout and the door bursts open. Ayu and her father call her name, and run at her, Masumi waiting in the doorway.

"Yuzu-neechan!"

"Yuzuuuuuuu!"

She smiles, still teary, and opens her arms to them. 'The you that's fighting to protect your friends isn't wrong,' she remembers Ute told her. It's not much, but it's enough.

She's home.


End file.
